The origins of 'humanitarian intervention' in intellectual reaction posted by Richard Seymour

The critique of Stalinism was by no means new, and The Gulag Archipelago contained no revelations. The New Left had almost unanimously held the Soviet Union to be a part of the problem, either because it was depraved, or because it was decrepit, or both. Solzhenitsyn’s text rapidly became a much-hyped reference point for socialists moving to the right; but, as Michael Scott Christofferson writes, ‘the vast majority of French intellectuals of the non-communist Left were already acutely aware of the failures of Soviet socialism’. Although much of the French Left, fearing a fascist reflux, defended the communists during the period in which they were increasingly ostracized, the Algerian war of independence and the Hungarian Revolution produced a more critical engagement. There had been at any rate a revival of libertarian and democratic ideals during Liberation’s hangover, and a sustained effort was made to reconcile these with revolutionary principles.

In February 1948, left-wing intellectuals had founded the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) as a coalition of the non-communist left, but it had collapsed by late 1949 on account of divisions over American power. Further efforts at developing a new Left committed to neutrality in the Cold War, anti-colonialism, and political and economic democracy, also floundered for the time being. The testimony of Victor Kravchenko – a former Soviet official who had defected and was associated with the CIA – confirmed the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union in 1947, and produced a debate among French progressives. Although the episode was marred by Kravchenko’s stridency and his association with American propaganda efforts, even fellow-travelling intellectuals such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre accepted that the concentration camps did exist and were not, as the PCF tried to claim, merely re-educational work camps. So, as early as 1950, and certainly by 1956, most of the noncommunist Left was apprised of the internal repression in the USSR – and certainly the Trotskyist Left had been arguing that the revolution had been betrayed since the 1930s.

Still, The Gulag Archipelago provided the occasion for confession and conversion, and a host of former Maoist revolutionaries would later end up adopting hard-line anti-communist positions, and rejecting in particular the Third Worldism that had characterized much of the French Left. These included such luminaries as Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Alain Finkielkraut and Pascal Bruckner. Bernard-Henri Lévy was never a Maoist militant, but he had been close to Louis Althusser, one of the chief theoreticians of a particular strand of normalien Maoism before May 1968. BHL had not been closely involved in the May 1968 uprising (although he claims it as a key moment for him, he was actually engaged in an affair at the time); but his first book, a journalistic account of the Bangladesh War, was written from a Marxist perspective. However, Lévy was so mortified by Solzhenitsyn’s exposé that he was moved to disparage his former Marxist commitments.

Or was he? While some have cast doubt on Lévy’s seriousness as a Marxist, as late as 1975 Lévy was still defending the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc against dissidents, and against Solzhenitsyn in particular. As the French Communist Party (PCF) went on the offensive against the Soviet novelist and his defenders, Lévy assured readers that Solzhenitsyn was ‘not a great writer’ but rather a ‘mythomaniac’, a ‘showbizman’ and a ‘gaffeur’ (meaning ‘blundering idiot’). He dismissed ‘the few clowns who arrive with us periodically, nineteenth- century novelists mislaid in the twentieth century, the Solzhenitsyn type…’ Regarding the dissidents, he maintained that they were hardly models of progressive thought themselves, and were ‘even sometimes of perfectly reactionary cloth’. All their testimony showed was that the USSR was ‘a country like any other’, ‘neither completely rosy nor completely black’. His preferred authority on the Soviet Union was Francis Cohen, whose chief distinction was that he had been the Moscow correspondent for the PCF’s newspaper L’Humanité. It is possibly that Lévy’s defence of the Soviet Union at this time was partly due to the influence of Louis Althusser who, while a critic of Stalinism, did not share the nostalgia for Tsarism that Solzhenitsyn exhibited. Another reason was the strength of the PCF and its weight in the organized Left.

By summer 1975, Lévy had concluded that the Soviet Union was not quite like any other state after all. The cause of its tyrannical nature lay in an ‘original sin’, not any corruption, ‘and the sin is Marx’. The Gulag Archipelago was ‘the finally blinding proof that terror in the USSR is everywhere’. Not only did it discredit the USSR, it proved that ‘terror is nothing more than the inside lining of sacrosanct socialism’ – although at this point Lévy did not deny the possibility of socialism outside the USSR.7 By the time he came to write La barbarie à visage humain, in 1977, he was convinced that the problem was not merely with the USSR, and not even only with overt Marxism, but with the whole paradigm of revolutionary thought issuing forth from May 1968 which, whether it knew it or not, was Marxist. Lévy’s method was as straightforward as his prose was convoluted: the Marxist conception of power involves a Master, or oppressor, a ‘lucid and diabolical anticonfessor’ who manipulates through ideology a ‘population of sleepwalkers’. Were this population to be awoken, and apprised of the ruses of capital and the modes of their exploitation, they would rebel. This paradigm was, he maintained, the reigning wisdom even among the anti-Marxists of the New Left. ‘There is a hidden impulse toward power, probably absolute power, whenever someone brandishes the slogan of total “liberation”’. The book affirmed a fundamental historical pessimism: progress was impossible, and every attempt at accomplishing it was a religious gesture, the ‘faith’ of ‘militants’ (Lévy’s book is replete with such metaphors – the litany of the Left, shepherds and flocks, prophets and devils. ‘Totalitarianism is confession without God, the inquisition plus the negation of the individual’ – and so on and on, straining for effect in that fashion, based on nothing more than the insipid anti-communist metaphor of The God That Failed). Far from being one of many responses to profound social iniquity, Marxism was ‘fanaticism’ a ‘ghostly “prophecy”’, and paradoxically a form of ‘counterrevolutionary thought’ dedicated to sustaining a given ‘end of history’. The frustration of the attempt to radically transform social conditions would necessarily lead to repression, and ultimately to the gulag. Written on the eve of the municipal election victory of the Union of the Left, uniting the Socialists and the PCF, Lévy explained that it was intended as a warning shot: the French Left was on the slippery slope to totalitarianism. And so: ‘There remains only the duty to protest against Marxism’ in all of its forms.

André Glucksmann had been, as noted in Chapter 3, both a Stalinist and a Maoist in his radical years. In 1956 he had been opposed both to the French ‘pacification’ of Algeria, and to the Soviet ‘pacification’ of Hungary. He had been a member of the violent Maoist group, Gauche prolétarienne, before that movement collapsed in the mid 1970s. In Le Maître penseurs, Glucksmann laid out the programmatic basis for his eschewal of Marxism: the master thinkers, including Hegel, Fichte, Nietzche and Marx, had systematically legitimized the dominative strategies of the modern state. The gulag was a result not only of ‘the logical application of Marxism’, but also of languages that ‘enable one to master everything’, admitting nothing outside themselves. Glucksmann’s self-congratulatory retelling has it that:

"I began with concrete and timely criticism of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Then I proceeded to a more extended critique of totalitarian thinking, in order not to be ensnared in a kind of intra-Marxist opposition – anti-Soviet but pro-Chinese, for example, or anti-Chinese but pro-Castro, and if not some form of sacred socialism, then the dear Third World … The next step was to fit this basic Marxist structure into a more general scheme, which I tracked to German philosophical thinking of the nineteenth century – a totalitarianoriented world view which could be expressed in rightist as well as leftist ideologies."

This is not quite accurate. Glucksmann, at this point, was still an opponent of the concept of ‘totalitarianism’. The standard presentation, he said, had ‘let the “non-totalitarian” regimes off the hook’, ignoring the ‘kinship’ and ‘filiation’ which linked the ‘harsh methods of domination employed in both the West and in the East’. He remembered that the British had developed concentration camps against the Boers before the Boers had thought of using them against black South Africans, and recalled enough of his anti–Vietnam War activity to point out the totalitarian resonances of the campaigns against ‘the Indians’, ‘the Vietnamese, the South Americans … or the inhabitants of Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki’. The ‘critique of totalitarianism shows a tiresome tendency to boil down always to a critique of totalitarianism elsewhere’.

This conception of a logical progress from anti-Stalinist critique to straightforward anti-communism is not simply a piece of self-serving revisionism by Glucksmann, however. It is a claim repeated by Julian Bourg in his account of the impact of May 1968 on French thought. As he puts it, ‘The Marxist tradition ironically provided the resources for overcoming Marxism … the passage from anti-Stalinism to anti- Marxism completed a logic.’ However, Bourg adds some heavy qualification to this somewhat glib observation. In the context of the death of Mao, the catastrophic rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the crises on the European Left, and the declining fortunes of the French Left, Bourg maintains that Solzhenitsyn’s text provided an orientation for those already prepared to escape Marxism. The idea that anti-Stalinist Marxism is logically already anti-communist is in fact one that supporters of the Soviet Union have always been prepared to brandish. Thus, Dolores Ibárruri (‘La Pasionaria’) argued during the Spanish Civil War that the attacks on the trotskysant POUM were justified because the Trotskyists were counter-revolutionaries. However, while it is true that the Maoists had a critique of the Soviet Union and of the politically timid PCF, they were of course completely uncritical of an equally authoritarian regime in China, which was regarded as the vanguard of anti-imperialist revolt. Indeed, as one internal document of the Maoist group Gauche Prolétarienne argued, ‘All error goes back to an incorrect interpretation of Mao.’ The cultish extolment of Mao as the philosopher and strategist of anti-imperialism did in many cases morph into a victimological approach to the Third World (the widely publicized fate of the Vietnamese Boat People providing a decisive moment for the ‘new philosophers’ and their co-ideologues). Equally, the ‘anti-authoritarian’ dynamic in the May 1968 generation could be re-interpreted as a critique of everything from the gulag to nationalization. It is, however, hard to see this as a strictly logical and coherent progression.

At any rate, Glucksmann’s 1977 thesis bears some resemblances to classical ‘totalitarianism’ theory, and Glucksmann was increasingly content to use the label. It is also, as Alain Badiou (once a Maoist confederate himself) argues, a profoundly pessimistic doctrine. The thrust of Glucksmann’s argument is that every ‘collective will to the Good creates Evil’. There can be no positive politics, nothing too radically transformative, only a liberal–conservative consensus created by an awareness of Evil, and the need to resist it. Glucksmann would go on to warn that the Union of the Left shared a programme with the ‘master thinkers’. Its left-Keynesian reform package, which was typical of the era, was seen as an attempt at maximizing state power. In an even more sinister fashion, the nationalization programme was, Glucksmann claimed, aimed at ‘the Jewish side of the “private sector” … not privilege or exploitation’.

Lévy and Glucksmann, known as the ‘New Philosophers’, became the stars of a new media product, and were followed by a raft of penitent Maoists and ex-Marxists. One of the means by which Lévy exerted his influence was as editor at the prestigious germanopratin publishing house, Grasset, where he could publish his friends among the nouveaux philosophes, notably Glucksmann. This crowd were quick to draw accusations of antisemitism, and critics were treated as germinal totalitarians. ‘You proceed like the police!’, Lévy told a critic. The nouveaux philosophes had been treated to ‘small Moscow trials’, while an ‘unavowed totalitarianism’ was brewing. Glucksmann worked himself up to splenetic issue at a talk by Julia Kristeva, at which Kristeva proclaimed Soviet dissidence as a model for Western intellectuals. When Kristeva declined to say who she would vote for, Glucksmann screamed from the floor: ‘We have finally got there! Control of party cards, of loyalty to the party. Here’s why we already need to be dissenting in France … the gulag has already begun.’ On that shrill note – which confirmed the nouveaux philosophes in their self-aggrandizing identification with the figure of the ‘dissident’, despite the fact that the context provided far more rewards than dangers to those claiming it – Paris entrenched itself, in Perry Anderson’s phrase, as ‘the capital of European intellectual reaction’.

This performance was received with some fanfare in the Anglo- American press. Time magazine, introducing the ‘new philosophers’ to its readership, borrowed the title of Jean-Marie Benoist’s 1970 book, declaring: ‘Marx Is Dead’. The Washington Post enthused about the ‘gorgeous’, ‘olive-toned and prominently boned’ Bernard-Henri Lévy. The Economist hailed ‘Those magnificent Marx-haters’. Ronald Reagan even paid tribute ‘the so-called new philosophers in France’ in his address to the UK parliament on promoting democracy, cherishing their ‘rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, [their] refusal to subordinate the rights of the individual to the superstate, [their] realization that collectivism stifles all the best human impulses.’

As Kristin Ross has argued, there was more in this movement than simply a rejection of any form of emancipatory politics beyond the confines of liberal democracy: it was also a reassertion of Eurocentrism against the Third Worldist sympathies that had helped to stimulate leftist revolt in the West at a time of relative economic stability. The ex-gauchiste, Pascal Bruckner, ridiculed Frantz Fanon’s ‘plea to “go beyond” Europe … It is impossible to “go beyond” democracy. If the peoples of the Third World are to become themselves, they must become more Western.’ Naturally, with this came a plea to abandon Western ‘guilt’, as if anti-imperialist critique was simply a form of self-flagellation. In his 1982 book Tears of the White Man, Bruckner affirmed: ‘Europe is our destiny, our lot. More than ever, we develop as individuals through the respect of its borders, its traditions, and its territorial integrity.’ Bernard-Henri Lévy argued that the ‘turning towards the Third World’ that French intellectuals experienced during the Algerian war involved intense ‘hatred of Europe’, something which could be divined by one’s support for the Black Panthers, for example. Israel, by contrast, had embodied ‘democracy and European values’ from its inception.

Ironies abound here: it could conceivably be argued that destroying a population, driving it from its territory by means of massacres, and engaging in continuous expansionist aggression in the name of creating an ethno-nationalist state is a fundamentally European value (one could call it ‘Herrenvolk democracy’); and there may indeed be something about the Black Panthers that grates against ‘European values’. But this hardly commends the ‘values’ that Lévy exhorts us to treasure. In an age of officially ‘socialist’ states proliferating across the world, following national liberation struggles, anti-communism could shade quite easily into anti–Third Worldism, as in Maurice Clavel’s 1976 evocation of the ‘yellow peril’: ‘with the elimination of the Cultural Revolution figures and the ongoing Sino-Soviet reconciliation, a billion robots are already resting their weight on the Elbe. Those two billion eyes blinking, or rather not blinking …’ Kristin Ross writes that the ‘accession to political subjectivity of “the wretched of the earth”’ had disrupted the master-narrative of the Cold War, in which liberalism was the sole appropriate alternative to the Soviet Union, and thus had to be revised.

One form of revisionism was to behave as if the committed anticolonial and anti-imperialist dimensions of the movement had never existed: thus, Bernard Kouchner, the current foreign minister of France, reduces his Maoist days to a period of ‘navel-gazing’ puerility. Only after his radicalism was aborted did he discover ‘the third world’ (even though he had himself travelled to Cuba in 1960 to interview Che Guevara). Another was to excise the agency of the Third World itself, as during the colonial epoch, subordinating it instead to a rights discourse. Kouchner is after all a pioneer in the business of ‘humanitarian intervention’, as a co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), formed in 1971 from a fusion between the Groupe d’Intervention Médicale et Chirurgicale en Urgence, and the Secours Médical Français. The organization was to extend the ethic of solidarity into the business of humanitarian aid.

However, Kouchner left MSF in 1979 to form a break-away organization called Médecins Du Monde. The occasion for this was a campaign to help rescue the ‘Boat People’ – a flood of refugees fleeing repression in Indochina – called ‘A Boat for Vietnam’. This boat would bring doctors to offer treatment to the sick or wounded, and a number of journalists to bear witness. If some considered this approach excessively media driven, it was only the accentuation of an already existing trend. Médecins Du Monde later developed the doctrine of the ‘right to intervene’, a doctrine which was outlined in 1987 by Kouchner and his associate Mario Betatti in front of the Socialist President Mitterrand and the conservative Prime Minister Chirac, thus gaining bipartisan support for it. To the argument that victims had a right to humanitarian assistance was added the stipulation that the state had an obligation to help provide it. With Kouchner in the cabinet from 1988 to 1993 – first as minister for humanitarian action, then as minister for health and humanitarian action – the consensus was sealed.

- The Liberal Defence of Murder, Verso, 2008, pp. 166-72

Labels: 'antitotalitarianism', 'humanitarian intervention', 'totalitarianism', bernard kouchner, bhl, eurocentrism, imperialism, liberal imperialism, marxism, socialism, the liberal defence of murder

Genealogy posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', blair, british empire, genocide, imperialism, iraq, neoconservatism, tony blair, US imperialism, war crimes, war criminal

Alberto Toscano on fanaticism posted by Richard Seymour

I have been procrastinating over this book for some time. I have intended to review it for more than a month now, but I've constantly put it off. This is primarily because of the difficulty I would have in doing it justice. It is the sort of book I would like to have written, or at least to have had available when I was writing Liberal Defence. It is the sort of book I will enjoy plagiarising, come to that. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that its remit covers much that is without my area of competence. The book was launched in a fairly packed hall at Marxism today, and focused mainly on the curious idea of "political religion", and the relevance of various invocations of "fanaticism" as a form of political critique.

We have encountered the trope of "native fanaticism" before, in the context of imperialist ideology, from Uttar Pradesh to Baghdad. Orientalism has produced various "Muslim fanatics" over the centuries. The figure of the fanatic is also a familiar subject of Cold War obloquy, from Spargo's appraisal of Bolshevik psychology to the 'antitotalitarian' literature of Fifties America and Seventies France. And of course, these discourses have been reinvented today to meet the putative challenge of "political religion". Today, "fanaticism" is held up as a sort of sock puppet opponent for those who would consider themselves enlightened, liberal, and modern. But is there anything that unites these various ideas? The answer might be that fanaticism is a mood, a psychic state characterised by a non-negotiable commitment to "something abstract" - whether that abstraction is revolutionary liberty, communism, or the earthly rule of God. In contrast, the liberal is empirical in his attitudes, and sensible of the need for compromise in pursuit of a modus vivendi. This is the ideologeme, the stereotype, or at least one variant of it.

Toscano's terse, penetrating account of the "uses" of "fanaticism" seeks to historicise and contextualise an idea that vigorously resists history and context. The book is not so much a history, though its chapters are arranged in a roughly chronological sequence, as a work of philosophy, a literary critique, a genealogy of ideas and also - inasmuch as each chapter could stand alone - a volume of thematically continuous essays. In examing different aspects of the idea of fanaticism, from origins in the Germans Peasants War (here he draws on the work of the excellent Peter Blickle), through its uses in the Enlightenment, in the defence of slavery and in imperialist theodicy, Toscano juggles an intimidating array of topics - psychoanalysis, philosophy, racism, anticommunism, recondite marxist polemics, secularism, anti-utopianism, etc etc. - comfortably shifting between multiple perspectives and analytical frameworks. One of the most surprising and enjoyable chapters in the book deals with the complex relationship between reason and fanaticism in Enlightenment thought. In this, we encounter fanaticism not merely as irrational dogma, but as a surfeit of reason. Indeed, the whole Burkean critique of those revolutionary "fanaticks" is precisely mounted on anti-rationalist precepts framed by one trained in Humean empiricism.

As far as "political religion" is concerned, this line of critique comes from two angles. One suggests that a political religion is a perverted expression of a spiritual impulse that is far better served by authentic religion. This raises a potentially discomfiting chain of induction for the devout since, by identifying religion with a set of ideological gestures and social processes, it raises the prospect that all religions are in essence no different to other ideologies and thus susceptible to the same modes of critique. The other angle, the response of the empiricist liberal ostentatiously displaying the looted intellectual treasury of the Enlightenment, suggests that the very idea that a form of politics recalls religion in having non-negotiable tenets, in pursuing non-empirical, abstract goals (eg, universality) is already to damn that politics. But that line of critique assumes that there is some form of behaviour that is essentially religious. Toscano deflates this with a choice quote from Kenelm Burridge:

"Meditating on the infinite may be a religious activity, so may writing a cheque, eating corpses, copulating, listening to a thumping sermon on hell fire, examining one's conscience, painting a picture, growing a beard, licking leprous sores, tying the body into knots, a dogged faith in human rationality - there is no human activity that cannot assume religious significance".

Which, if you think about it, somewhat takes the sting out of the charge of "political religion". The war on terror has of course produced various kinds of 'anti-fanatical' discourse. In the main, this is has focused on Islam, although some of the soft liberal critique of the neoconservative right also takes this form - they're obsessed with some kind of abstract global democratic revolution, because they're all closet Trotskyists. But that aside, the main way in which we encounter such discourses is with respect to Islam. Toscano is entertaining on the history of this kind of vituperation, particularly on the laboured analogies drawn between Islam and communism. Depending on who you listen to, Islam is the communism of the 21st Century; communism was the Islam of the 20th Century; Lenin was Mohammed (Keynes); Robespierre was Mohammed (Hegel); and even Hitler was Mohammed (Barth, Jung). The logic is curious. It is as if Islam itself is merely a worldly, materialist social doctrine in devotional get-up; but at the same time, Bolshevism (and/or Nazism, depending on who you're hearing from) is really a fanatical pseudo-religious doctrine with worldly trappings. It sets up a dichotomy that automatically deconstructs. But the even more curious thing is how, from the counter-revolutionaries of the 18th Century to the counterinsurgency texts of the 21st Century, the role of 'fanaticism' always turns out to mandate an equal and opposite 'fanaticism' in retort: since our enemy is fanatical, will stop at nothing, knows none of the humane and liberal limits that we assume, we must be fanatical, stop at nothing, throw aside our humane and liberal limits, otherwise all is lost.

Toscano has much fun, and vents justified disgust, at the expense of the turgid polemics about Islam that have been produced in the context of philosophy and psychoanalysis. This includes, but is not restricted to, a finely pointed, piercing critique of Zizek's engagement, or non-engagement, with Islam. In contrast to his ostentatiously philosophical approach to Christianity and Judaism, Toscano maintains, Zizek's encounters with Islam are strictly ideological, or sociological, tending merely to reproduce trite clash-of-civilizations discourses, predictable interrogations of the 'veil' that feed into the usual moral panics, dichotomies that award to Christianity an emancipatory, rationalist kernel that is held to be missing from Islam, and which produce the Muslim-as-pervert, the fundamentalist fanatic with a direct line to God. Taken in conjunction with Zizek's particular appropriation of Bloch's atheism-in-Christianity thesis, his belabouring of Islam feeds into the typical problematic of a Christianity that is supposedly the religion to end all religions, but is chronologically prior to Islam and is in some sense haunted by Islam's alterity. At best, this results in Orientalist pseudo-analysis of the kind that his favourite philosopher, Hegel, was rather fond of. The relationship between this kind of 'anti-fanatical' discourse and Zizek's broader Eurocentrism, not to mention his explicit apologias for US imperialism in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, is obvious and requires no elaboration here. I will not do Toscano's analysis - either with regard to Zizek, or the wider topic of psychoanalytic treatment of Islam - justice by attempting to render it in a few brief phrases here. But I found it useful to have an argument that meets and bests the psychoanalyst on his own turf.

This dissection of fanaticism, and the family of concepts surrounding it such as political religion, totalitarianism, and so on, is a potent intervention that defends radical and revolutionary Enlightenment, and the emancipatory ideologies emanating from it, from the pall of misappropriation on the one hand, and defamation on the other. It is a compendium of useful idiocies trumped by biting retorts, extravagant rhetoric let down by coolly deflating satire, rampant idealism met and surpassed by sophisticated materialism. For those who remain faithful to the liberating adventure of Enlightenment-as-insubordinate-thought, who still cleave to the possibility of emancipation licensed by reason, and who are marginalised by doctrines of extremity on account of it, this book is a weapon. In the best sense, it is, as Tocqueville said of French revolutionary ideology, "armed opinion".

Labels: 'totalitarianism', colonialism, communism, enlightenment, fanaticism, imperialism, islam, islamophobia, native fanaticism, political religion, slavery

Proposal for the refoundation of the Committee of Public Safety posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'antitotalitarianism', 'totalitarianism', france, french revolution, history, revisionism, simon schama, zizek

A few points about fascism posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', antifascism, bnp, fascism, islamophobia, racism, unite against fascism

Brief note on the function of 'political religion' posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', 'war on terror', hannah arendt, nazism, political religion, stalinism

Last will and testament posted by Richard Seymour

With a part of themselves, humans relish cruelty and war and absolute capricious authority, are bored by civilized and humane pursuits and understand only too well the latent connection between sexual repression and orgiastic vicarious collectivised release. Some regimes have been popular not in spite of their irrationality and cruelty, but because of it. There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winston Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus's rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold. This long and steady look into the void was Orwell's apotheosis of 'the power of facing'. (pp 169-70)

Labels: 'totalitarianism', christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

A tragicomedy in one paragraph. posted by Richard Seymour

For the notaries of humanist imperialism there is nothing as perplexing, and no outrage as great, as a politically astute and historically literate attack on their whole tradition by a playwright. Of all the bruschetta-munchers in all the world, a playwright. If you thought that David Edgar's essay would pass without some effort to put the little quill driver back in his place, you haven't been paying attention. Among the piqued responses I have seen is this frightful tribute to affronted vanity (entitled 'Six Straw Men and One Pat On My Back'). Another is the riposte by a promoted food critic with a mordacious journalistic manner. The latter's plaidoyer, true to style, opens with an interrogation which I want to interrogate in turn:

Conveniently early in his essay on "defection literature", David Edgar gives the game away:

"Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism) so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our time."

Do we get the idea that describing the Soviet model, with its vast network of gulags and millions of state murders and total party control, as "totalitarian" was a historical error? Certainly, that's the suggestion left hanging like a two-pig-owning kulak.

As unlettered as this evidently is, as much as it discloses the hasty prosecutorial zeal of the polemical dilettante, there is an education of sorts lurking here. A sentimental education whose syllabus, originating in Fifties America, has been relentlessly globalised. It is apt that those who disposed of marbles, scruples or both in the post-9/11 reflux should so unreflectively reproduce the precepts of anti-communism, and Andrew Anthony does not make an exception of himself.

There are three points to call attention to here. The first is that of course there is a legitimate controversy over whether 'totalitarianism' is a worthwhile concept, and another for those who accept it as to what it's reach should be. The second is that Andrew Anthony would, on this evidence, have no basis for making such discernments. For him, it is a moral failing not to accept the schema of 'totalitarianism' because for him it is just a word one uses to refer to a state that is not merely very bad, but wicked, egregious, evil. The third is that while Edgar speaks of communism, Anthony speaks of a single regime that purported to embody communism. A whole series of distinctions is being lost here: between different kinds of communist ideology; between different kinds of regime; between different kinds of movement; and between ideology, movement and regime. It is a catechism of anti-communist ideology that such distinctions do not matter, of course. The roots of Stalinist repression are in the organicist conceptions of its ideological forebears, (conceptions they shared with their apparent ideological opposites), and that exhausts all wisdom on the subject. I am not saying that this is what Andrew Anthony thinks, because that would imply that some thought had gone into his excursus, and nowhere is this in evidence. But these are the ideological co-ordinates that structure the sentiment before it is inculcated. (This propaganda film offers a concise account of the ideology, despite its now archaic feel). The political map of the twentieth century can thus be arranged in a simple binary:



Obviously, I left out apartheid and other colonial relics, not to mention indigenous genocide and most of the authoritarian states that might in some views qualify as 'totalitarian lite', 'diet totalitarian' or 'I Can't Believe It's Not Totalitarian'. Totalitarianism versus democracy, the simple all-purpose political struggle. Today, the reinvention of 'anti-totalitarianism' relies on the celebrity of the stateless criminal enterprise of 'Al Qaeda', so 'totalitarianism' is no longer posed primarily as a question of the state versus the individual. Rather, it is refurbished with Victorian cant, its dichotomies revolving around the liberal versus the illiberal, the civilized versus the uncivilized, the progressive versus the barbaric. These work, as they always have, as structures of feeling and intuition rather than as analytical frameworks. In the era of the Cold War, liberals acquiesced in crimes sometimes tantamount to genocide while their idealism and wisdom was being extolled in official propaganda and while they were assured that their ideals were defended by the Pentagon and the CIA. In era of the 'war on terror', some liberals are complicit in grave crimes just as they are encouraged to believe that their always nebulous 'values' are at stake. This is a sentimental education whose output is an unattractive and strident assertiveness about 'Western values', which is as defensive as it is obtuse. This is why its sophisters cannot help but see their critics as in some sense treasonous, for the 'other side'. This is why they cannot help but inculpate, and why they are so drawn to the accusatory style even where all they expose is their own ignorance and lack of thought. It is no laughing matter: Anthony is stuck with his Pavlovian reactions, as are his co-partisans. David Edgar just rang the right bells.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', cruise missile liberals, islamophobia, liberals, pro-war 'left', the liberal defense of murder

Only Following Orders posted by Richard Seymour

“I’ve got a standard answer on that. I felt nothing about it….I'm sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too....People get mad when I say this but--it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I’m concerned, so I had no personal part in it…” "It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another…I did what I was told--I didn't invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I’ve left it.…I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep….”

...

Truman invited him to the Oval Office in 1948 and asked him, “What do you think?” Tibbets responded, “Mr. President, I think I did what I was told.” Truman replied, slapping the table, “You’re damn right you did, and I’m the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me.” In The Tibbets Story, however, he relates the conversation a little differently with Truman advising him, “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”

Labels: 'totalitarianism', capitalism, culture of genocide, hiroshima

Sovietology posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', cold war, sovietology, ussr

Only giving the people what they want, part II posted by Richard Seymour

Breakthroughs in brain science have revealed that people are primarily emotional decision-makers. . . . Emotions are central, not peripheral, to both marketplace and workplace behavior. As a result, companies able to identify, quantify, and thereby act on achieving emotional buy-in or acceptance from consumers and employees alike will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', homo economicus, rationality

Only giving the people what they want. posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', market metaphysic, media

"The Nazi Conscience" posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', capitalism, nazism